Water Seed — Old school in the best way possible

The scenes are stereotypical and embedded in the minds of anyone who has seen them through the wonders of film or television. The world of musical academia, complete with stuffy professors, hours of theory classes, and general boredom.

It’s a complete 180 from what you get when you hear New Orleans’ Water Seed, and though drummer / percussionist Lou Hill has that academic background from Xavier University of Louisiana, he is quick to debunk that aforementioned stereotype. At least if you’re attending music classes in his home state.

“In a New Orleans classroom, if you couldn’t have groove and didn’t have feeling, they were kicking you out,” he laughs. “You have to understand the full experience of music. It’s not about the theory, it’s about feeling and how to make people feel a particular way and emoting those feelings. That’s what the most important things was.”

Knowing that is the same requirement for playing in Water Seed, which will hit The Bitter End in NYC tonight. You’ve gotta groove, you’ve got to play with feeling, but you also have to know what you’re talking about — so to speak — musically.

“What we try to do is make music with a level of complication sound easy,” he said.

Complicated or not, it sounds and feels good, and when Water Seed do take the stage, make sure you carve out a good chunk of time to see them and take it all in, as they’re not here to play a 40-minute set and walk off the stage.

“Last night we did a show from 9pm to 12am, so three hours, and I think we’ve maxed at three and a half hours; and that’s without a break,” Hill said in an October 5 interview.

That’s a lost art these days.

“I don’t know if it’s an art, but it’s definitely something,” he said. “All I can say is we’ve modeled ourselves off the bands that you would go see and they would literally wear the crowd out. They go, ‘Man, I’m exhausted, I don’t know how they can go that long.’ But then every time we come to that city or town, you have to go because you know you’re going to get more than your money’s worth. So with us, everybody that I really love to see, they put on a massive show, where it’s really entertaining. You get your money’s worth and it’s just a great experience. I hope it’s not a lost art and I hope we’ll never do a short show like that because we have so much to say and we want to say it.”

Unfortunately, many artists these days save what they have to say for Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. That’s not the way Water Seed (Hill, Cinese, J Sharp, Shaleyah, I.M.A., Abel Melody) operates, giving them another positive notch on their old school credibility belt.

“People have said to us, ‘The music is great, now you just gotta catch up to the branding and everything else,’” Hill said. “We’re trained musicians and we want to be respected as such. We want the respect of everybody, from great jazz and classical people to your every day music lover. I don’t know if we planned it that way, but we were doing what we do. And it just so happens that in my mind, everything else changed. Everybody else became so fascinated with what type of toothpaste you use and everything like that (Laughs), and we just kinda said, hey, if we have to talk about that, cool, we’ll talk about it. But I think to us, individually and as musicians, none of that matters if the music isn’t good. We’re all about longevity and creating an experience and classic music. Social media has its place and it’s important in today’s society and we get it, but that’s a work in progress for us and it’s nothing without actually having good music.”

Water Seed has the music. The rest will follow. For tonight, there’s a gig to play and they’re ready to bring a piece of the Big Easy to the Big Apple.

“New York is still a hard city,” Hill said. “We’ve played it a few times and we’ve had some great shows and we’ve had some shows that were less than great. But it is still a hard town. It’s a town where you don’t get a second chance. You have to really put on the best show you can put on. I’ll say the same thing for New Orleans. You can’t come into New Orleans half-steppin’. You really have to come with it. They’re two cities that understand their heritage very well.”

Water Seed plays The Bitter End in NYC tonight, October 11. For more information, click here